Issue Voting in U.S. House Elections

Representative democracy is based on the idea that citizens choose the candidates who most closely share their policy views and concerns. There is surprisingly little evidence for this idea from elections for the House of Representatives, however, primarily due to a lack of appropriate data. We overcome the data problems by employing the large samples from CCES surveys, and coding candidates’ policy positions from the campaign webpages of 394 major party candidates between 2010 and 2020. We find vote choice in House elections is strongly a function of agreement with the candidates on the issues, controlling for many alternative explanations that prior research has found to be important. We test six hypotheses about when issue voting should be more or less important. We know of no prior research on congressional elections that has comparably detailed evidence that clearly demonstrates that congressional elections provide citizens with considerable levels of substantive representation.